Google posted a high level overview of how Google Translate works.
Source: Google
August 12, 2010
How Google Translate Works
July 28, 2010
An interesting hack from Yahoo! Openhack India
Sound familiar?
Automatic, Real-time close captioning/translation for flickr videos.
How?
We captured the audio stream that comes out to speaker and gave as input to mic. Used Microsoft Speech API and Julius to convert the speech to text. Used a GreaseMonkey script to sync with transcription server(our local box) and video and displayed the transcribed text on the video. Before displaying the actual text on the video, based on the user’s choice we translate the text and show it on video. (We used Google’s Translate API for this).
Srithar, B. (2010). Yahoo! Openhack India 2010- FlicksubZ. Retrieved on July 28, 2010 from Srithar’s Blog Website: http://babusri.blogspot.com/2010/07/yahoo-openhack-india-2010-flicksubz.html
Check out the whole post.
July 24, 2010
Converting .sbv to .trans/continuous text
As a step in comparing the output from YouTube’s Autocaptioning, we need to transform their .sbv file into something we can use in our comparison tests (a .trans file). We needed to strip the hours out of the timecode, drop the end time, and bring everything to a single line.
Update: It turns out we needed a continuous text file. So these have been updated accordingly.
July 19, 2010
Caption File Formats
There’s been some discussion on the Matterhorn list recently about caption file formats, and I thought it might be useful to describe what we’re doing with file formats for SpokenMedia.
SpokenMedia uses two file formats, our original .wrd files output from the recognition process and Timed Text Markup Language (TTML). We also need to handle two other caption file formats .srt and .sbv.
There is a nice discussion of the YouTube format at SBV file format for Youtube Subtitles and Captions and a link to a web-based tool to convert .srt files to .sbv files.
We’ll cover our implementation of TTML in a separate post.
Continue Reading
June 21, 2010
Towards cross-video search
Here’s a workflow diagram I put together to demonstrate how we’re approaching the problem of searching over the transcripts of multiple videos and ultimately returning search results that maintain time-alignment for playback.
Source: Brandon Muramatsu
Preparing Transcripts for Search Across Multiple Videos
You’ll notice I included using OCW on lecture slides to help in search and retrieval–this is not an area we’re currently focusing on, but we have been asked about it. A number of researchers and developers have looked at this area–if/when we include it, we’d work with folks like Matterhorn (or perhaps others) to integrate the solutions that they’ve implemented.
June 17, 2010
Making Progress
In the last month or two we’ve made some good progress with getting additional parts of the SpokenMedia workflow into a working state.
Here’s a workflow diagram showing what we can do with SpokenMedia today.
Source: Brandon Muramatsu
SpokenMedia Workflow, June 2010
(The bright yellow indicates features working in the last two months, the gray indicates features we’ve had working since December 2009, and the light yellow indicates features on which we’ve just started working.)
May 26, 2010
Video from OCWC Global Presentation
The OpenCourseWare Consortium has posted the video of our talk during OCWC Global 2010 in Hanoi, Vietnam.
Cite as: Muramatsu, B., McKinney, A. & Wilkins, P. (2010, May 5). Opening Up IIHS Video with SpokenMedia. Presentation at OCWC Global 2010: Hanoi, Vietnam, May 5, 2010. Retrieved May 6, 2010 from Vimeo Web site: http://vimeo.com/11969270
May 11, 2010
PageLayout as a step towards Rich Media Notebooks
During a meeting with our collaborators at ICAP, of the Universite de Lyon 1 in France, Fabien Bizot demonstrated the PageLayout Flash/Air app that he was working on for Spiral Connect.
When we launched the SpokenMedia project, we knew that we wanted to ultimately focus on how learners and educators use video accompanied by transcripts. Over the last year, we’ve focused on the automatic lecture transcription technology that was developed in the Spoken Lecture project–as a means to enable the notions of rich media notebook we had been discussing.
Fabien Bizot’s work with PageLayout may be the first step to a user interface learners and educators might use to interact with video linked with transcripts.
